Replacing PDF is Stuck and I Can't Trash the Original File

Dorico
1

Hi -

Dorico 5.1.7, 2017 Intel iMac, macOS 13.7

This has happened a couple of times with Dorico in the past few days.

I edit a Dorico file and extract it as PDF and OK replacing the original PDF. A popup with a progress bar announces that the file is being sent to the trash but it’s apparently stuck in some kind of loop. I tried renaming the original file and a new popup appeared:

“Harmonic Series.pdf” can’t be moved right now because it’s being used by another task, such as moving or copying an item or emptying the Trash. Try again when the current task is complete.

But, twenty minutes later the new task (the overwrite) is still in progress. Relaunching the Finder had no effect. Closing and re-opening Dorico had no effect. Restarting my Mac had no effect.

I’ve replaced PDFs from Pages in this same time period without a problem.

Any insights are welcome!

Cheers,

Gary

2

Normally, Dorico provides an alert, asking if you want to overwrite the file, or not. If you want to overwrite the file, then it just gets overwritten. Dorico doesn’t send files to the Trash (when exporting files).

Also, it’s very weird that the problem in the Finder should persist after a reboot.

Are you saving to your local disk, or to a cloud drive?

Also: those iMacs tend to have Fusion Drives, which means you’ve got a 7-year-old mechanical hard drive in there. Maybe perform First Aid on the disk.

Can you open the Terminal app, and type lsof (plus a space), then drop the PDF file on to the Terminal window. Then press Enter, and paste the results here.

Here’s an example, showing that the text file is opened by BBEdit.

Ben@Bens-Mini % lsof /Users/Ben/Desktop/Lyrics\ from\ Untitled\ Project\ 2.txt 
COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF     NODE NAME
BBEdit  1211  Ben   38r   REG   1,18      800 65910483 /Users/Ben/Desktop/Lyrics from Untitled Project 2.txt
3

If you have the PDF open in another program, then Dorico may not be able to overwrite the file, depending on whether the other program in which the PDF is open actively locks the file in the filesystem.

1 Like
4

Thanks, benwiggy -

The culprit is, indeed, my aging iMac. I did find one adware file in my startup items and removing it has improved things a bit - I was also unable to open any new apps 20 to 30 minutes after a restart. That was apparently the adware’s fault. Ironically, the adware was installed by a Clean My Mac app that I had auditioned and rejected. Lesson learned.

I don’t know why Dorico PDFs in particular couldn’t overwrite when I was able to overwrite PDFs from Pages. More research at Apple suggests that my hard drive is failing even though the Disk Utility says all is well. Ugh.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Gary